Happy New Year everyone! Welcome to 2012. According to the predictions, this is going to be a very interesting year indeed. It is most definitely going to be very interesting for me personally, and I will fill you in as the year goes along. How’s that for a little suspense (big grin)?
To begin with, I can’t believe that I haven’t posted since July! This is not because I don’t have anything to say, but rather because I’ve been so busy. Nevertheless, this little blog has had more views this year than ever. More than 1600 people from all over the world have dropped by to read my posts, which makes me very happy and honored. Apparently people are interested in some of my more technical posts about cleaning alpaca (always a popular topic!), blending wool and building yarn meters. I plan on expanding these types of articles this year, with the next one being about fulling – so stay tuned!
So what have I been up to in the past five months? My main projects have been knitting a fair isle hat and mittens for yet another one of the babies at work and a hoodie for a friend’s toddler. I wish I could say that these projects have been quick and easy, but they’ve taken longer than I thought, mostly due to my limited time for my craft life right now. Fortunately, one of my major goals for this year is to increase time for my creative side, so we’ll see how things go.
Here are some photos of the gloves and hat that I finally finished for Greyson, one of the babies born in our office about six months ago. These are based on the “Safe Return” mitten pattern from Interweave Knits 2011 Knitting Traditions collection. The blues are commercial yarn and the white and gray are my handspun alpaca.
Safe return mittens and hat
Greyson wearing his hat and mittens
Another fun project that I’ve taken on in the past few months was teaching a friend how to spin! This is actually a very unexpected story. My friend Patricia belongs to a church where one of the pastors owns a flock of Romney sheep. Last year, her pastor had the idea of joining her two “flocks” by getting the church involved in learning to spin her wool. Now the funny thing is that Patricia had no idea that I spin and I had no idea that she was trying to find someone to teach her how to spin. One day we were engaged in our usual activity together – i.e. pulling blackberry in the local park, when we started talking about knitting and next thing you know she tells me this whole story about her pastor. Of course I invited her over to my house to use my carder and picker and over the course of a few weeks, spun up some of her wool. She then used this wool to make two pairs of wolf slippers, using my pattern, for two pastors in her church, which was a surprise for them. They turned out really cute!
Wolf slippers
Wolf slippers
A few weeks later, I came over to her house with my wheel and gave her a spinning lesson and left my wheel with her for a week. She picked it right up and will hopefully be getting a wheel of her own pretty soon. What a great end to last year and a wonderful new dimension to our friendship!
